Greenfield: Did Identity Politics Doom Dems?

The trend is likely to continue at least through the 2018 midterm...

I hope so. The GOP collectively needs to put one theme at the top of their platform for 2018: The Dems want to open the borders.

Identity politics (also known as class warfare) is a cornerstone of dialectical Marxism.

Bingo. What we are seeing here is a replay of the division within Marxism itself: who constitutes a "class" and on what basis?

Marx furiously defended his assertion that only economics mattered; that a black and a white proletarian had more in common as proletariat than different as races. So, too, with nationalism, and he would have been profoundly disappointed to see German working men fighting Russian working men at the end of WWI despite the revolution in the latter.

It is a bit of an oversimplification, but one of the upshots of the Frankfurt School was that there can be other class descriptors, all related to some sort of social oppression or other. Hence the transposition of Marxist precepts into the various "liberation" movements.

The fundamental weakness - one might call it an "internal contradiction" to use old Karl's term - is that this allows membership in multiple classes, with conflicting class interests within each individual. (Which, incidentally, leads to the conclusion that the only proper repository of political rights is within the individual citizen, which is entirely contrary to Marxism).

What Greenfield has articulated brilliantly here is that such alliances are by nature only temporary; that at some point - his example is the white coal miners - the model simply cannot withstand reality. And I think it isn't so much a choice between manipulating the American public around class and manipulating the American public around race; I think that neither one will do, at least in the long term. That's heresy to certain campus social theoreticians but they're going to have to move with the times.

But it makes sense when you consider the failure of Hillary's attempt to leverage Women's Liberation into political office. It's about thirty years too late, and only by focusing narrowly on the specific office of President is it even a coherent case in American politics. If there's a glass ceiling, it's a very long way up there. You can only raise passion over that in a comfortable population whose every other need is satisfied and whose members don't feel the pressure of being a black woman or a Hispanic woman or, heaven help us, a white woman whose husband happens to be a coal miner.

And underlying it all is that grand identity within American politics: that of being Americans who love their country. That used to be the one sine qua non of every election, yet we reached a point in this last election where a Democrat rally embarrassingly discovered that its promoters had failed to provide American flags and that nobody had noticed. A coalition built without a wrapper falls apart, and so it did.

I'm not quite as satisfied, however, that this sort of thing cannot turn on a dime, it being so highly dependent on the candidate. Witness, for example, the sudden transition of the Democrats from Henry Wallace to Harry Truman.

Greenfield's other insight is that the real coalition within the current Democrat party is nearly all urban, including urban racial power centers and academia - I would place most of the media in that category as well. Maps of the Democrat vote in the last election and city populations were nearly indistinguishable. Something like this appears to be the case in western Europe as well. One might be tempted to cede globalism to the boulevards if only they'd leave the rest of us alone but that isn't going to happen.

The fundamental weakness - one might call it an "internal contradiction" to use old Karl's term - is that this allows membership in multiple classes, with conflicting class interests within each individual.

And within the competing classes themselves. Witness the irony of a white transgender male who is shunned by female "feminist" athletes because he/she can outperform any of them by virtue of his/her biology. Or the lesbian lobby that demands "equality" but that doesn't want to have women register for the draft or get shot to pieces on the front lines.

And what about the black male incompetent who, due to affirmative action, gets a job the white lesbian dwarf doesn't get?

As each "class" recognizes the power inherent in pretended victimhood, each clamors to be the new victim, and to edge out the "old" victim class. Thus, Marxism tears itself apart, as we're starting to witness now when, for example, left-wing snowflakes are told they can't participate in BLM riots ... er, I mean demonstrations ... because it's "cultural appropriation."

The emphasis on immigration is going to doom the Democratic party, whose members have neither cultural cohesiveness nor cultural framework. Somehow a Hispanic and a Black and a Gay and a Transgender Dwarf all have something in common. It’s like putting everyone into the room because they all have red hair. Simply, there is too much diversity, no core world view.

An ideology that once defined itself by labor is far more interested in charting the erratic emotions of unstable college kids than in the real problems of working people.

Priceless.